Slayers - Volume 5 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator/Editor Chat!

[Meg/ED]

So, we pick up virtually right where we left off last time: with our crew innocently heading toward Dils. Now, my question for you is this... do you think it’s fair to say we ran into the plot along the way?

[Liz/TL]

There might’ve been a little bit of plot here and there. Hard to say. Too many demons!

[Meg/ED]

Our demon count has indeed increased dramatically!

[Liz/TL]

But yeah, we’ve had some foreshadowing to it beforehand but I think this is the volume that for sure puts us on the road to building up the big plot that will commence in volume 8. It helps that we officially form our team of four this volume, although is it really more like a team of four plus one?

[Meg/ED]

I recall the author promising in the volume 3 afterword that we’d be swept up in a much grander epic soon, and it’s fun to see the pieces start to come together. Although I’ve been scratching my head for years (honestly) about how exactly our “plus one” fits into the equation...

[Liz/TL]

How do you mean?

[Meg/ED]

I’ve been debating with my friends for well over a decade now about whether Xellos should be considered part of the main party, so to speak. It certainly feels like it at times, but one of our big reveals this volume is that his ambitions... aren’t necessarily in line with everyone else’s, shall we say? Calling him a “plus one” is really a great way to put it, actually!

[Liz/TL]

I mean, he specifically tells them this volume that he’s not a member of the team! Though I think the anime muddied those waters a little bit with TRY. I of course didn’t realize that whole arc was anime-original at the time, but it basically seems designed to give Xellos more screentime and make him feel more like “part of the team,” doesn’t it?

[Meg/ED]

I was thinking the same thing. It’s definitely easier to think of Xellos as part of the gang when he shows up at the beginning of NEXT (all the way back for the Halciform story) and then just sort of hangs out for a while.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, whereas in the novels his role is a bit more streamlined (for obvious reasons). Not that Teenage Me minded the extra Xellos content!

[Meg/ED]

Hard same! But perhaps I’ve jumped the gun here a bit. Xellos is, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, the mysterious “you-know-who” that I think I’ve managed to mention somehow in every chat session we’ve had thus far. And, for all the hubbub, our introduction to him this volume is actually pretty mild.

[Liz/TL]

He shows up, saves the de-powered Lina, gives her the talismans and then disappears for a while. What’s interesting is that all those things happen in NEXT, too, but in a very different context.

[Meg/ED]

Indeed! And as a bit of a sidebar, I love the fact that we never find out what really happened to Mazenda, who’s initially introduced like she’s going to be our main villain for this volume.

[Liz/TL]

She is a real big bad with a big final battle in the anime, isn’t she? Kanzaka talks in the afterwords about how the first-person perspective means there are some things that are mentioned that we just never see. I imagine some people might find that disappointing, but it definitely fits in with his philosophy of making sure the world feels bigger than our heroes. Sometimes you just never learn someone’s motivation, or a battle takes place and you’re not there. You couldn’t get away with that in an anime (gotta put the money on the screen!) but for a novel, I like it. It makes me think of The Hobbit where Bilbo gets knocked out and misses the big battle, or how Gandalf just wanders off and fights the Necromancer. It gives you things to imagine in the moment, or rediscover later after you gain new knowledge.

[Meg/ED]

There are other authors who wouldn’t hesitate to jump perspectives and let us get a taste of the story from someone else’s point of view, but I do agree it’s fun not to know sometimes. Especially when there’s a bigger mystery involved, and there sure is here.

[Liz/TL]

If you don’t know what’s up with Xellos at this point there’s a lot of mystery. Maybe he didn’t really kill Mazenda, and they’re working together on a bigger intrigue? We already know Lina can leap to (very) wrong conclusions, so it’s not like her monologue is any guide.

[Meg/ED]

Goodness knows there’s a lot left to unravel about everyone’s favorite mysterious priest. But as far as this volume is concerned, there’s another pretty big player we should talk a bit about since we finally get to see the silver beast, or at least an incarnation thereof, in action!

[Liz/TL]

He’s a good wolfy boy. Well okay, maybe not.

[Meg/ED]

I remember being quite struck at the end of the first season of the anime when it turned out that copy-Rezo was trying to use a manuscript to tap into Zanaffar’s power back in Sairaag. At first I felt like we were getting ahead of ourselves, but the anime isn’t done with him there. Revolution has an interesting take on this particular installment of ol’ Zanny’s story, no?

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, Revolution sort of gives that plot another try, and does the shape of it if not the substance. There’s no dark lord cult, but a wider plot about a kingdom that’s been ravaged by a plague and received no aid. Saillune does end up the final target, and Duclis is there, but he’s kind of the mastermind behind it instead of being saddest pawn in game of life.

In the anime, he’s still treated as a tragic figure, but he’s more the archetype who gets his life ruined and seeks a pyrrhic revenge, rather than the hapless but philosophical everyman we get in the novel.

[Meg/ED]

And what an interesting choice that is. I have to admit that I felt for the guy in the novel (especially after the wholly unsympathetic Vedul). It’s fun because there’s a lot we miss getting the story entirely from Lina’s perspective, but her initial encounter with Duclis is a little something extra that the first-person actually adds for us.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah I really like the buildup of him just being the nice guy Lina meets along the road who thinks he’s helping a lost kid. He’s a bad guy in service to a horrific cause, but he’s kind of given up on himself, deciding it’s just his lot in life. But again, harder to do that kind of low-key tragedy on the screen.

I mentioned Lina getting the talismans from Xellos earlier, but she also uses the Ragna Blade for the first time, and loses her powers to Mazenda in the same arc in NEXT. The Ragna Blade isn’t unlocked by the power of the talismans in the anime, but by a scrap of the Claire Bible manuscript that they find when trying to cure Lina. And it’s all melded in with the Saillune royal family intrigue arc. 

[Meg/ED]

Man, it was hard to talk about the anime adaptation of volume 4 without the discussion bleeding into this one because their plots are entirely crossed. (My notes look a bit like a murder board.) And, gosh, looking ahead... things are really just starting to kick off, aren’t they?

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, we are definitely getting into the section where it’s harder to talk about adaptations without accidentally spoiling future volumes. Though, I guess it’s not a spoiler to say that the next volume will give us a return to Zuma, the assassin from volume 4 who was skipped over originally, but finally got his due in the 2009 Slayers revival.

[Meg/ED]

Ah, so you could say there’s a shadow in Vezendi, huh?

[Liz/TL]

I guess that would be a literal description of events, yes!

[Meg/ED]

And the demon count is only going to go up from here...

[Liz/TL]

You never know where they’ll show up next.

[Meg/ED]

Maybe we should all get a few talismans of our own for next time!